The United States is reportedly seeking a new agreement with the European Union and Pacific Rim countries in order to stop China’s growing economic power.
The deal was planned because Washington is worried the US could lose influence to China, The Hill reported on Friday.
According to the report, “Congress and the White House are pushing broad trade deals that risk triggering an economic fight with China.”
“The EU and the United States share the goal of using the agreement to jointly pioneer new and more effective approaches to issues of common concern in third countries and in the global trading system itself, such as state-owned enterprises and measures that favor domestic industries,” a spokeswoman for the Office of the US Trade Representative said in an interview with The Hill.
China, however, says the agreement will be an act by the US to try to force changes to China’s domestic laws.
“Now they’re talking about policies that are more concerned with sovereign, domestic decisions,” said Huo Jianguo, president of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. “That means behind borders, within your own countries.”
“There are many new rules – we need to get their meaning and understand whether all these rules will apply to the whole world,” he said. “That’s most difficult – how to unite, how to connect different countries’ policies and make it fair and open.”
The White House issued a fact sheet when it launched talks with the EU about the deal in summer.
According to the fact sheet, the two sides would seek to “develop rules, principles, and new modes of cooperation on issues of global concern, including intellectual property and market-based disciplines addressing state-owned enterprises and discriminatory localization barriers to trade.”
China won’t eclipse the US economy until 2028, a new study by the Center for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) predicted on Thursday.
“China’s spectacular economic development has continued and although the increasing maturity of its economy and relatively unfavorable demographics mean that growth will inevitably slow, we still expect China to overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy in 2028 for the first time since 1890…This is later than some analysts have suggested,” the CEBR said.